


tell me that i'm pretty

by Anonymous



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Ann takamaki is a good, Dysphoria, Gen, but that wasnt the intent, could be read as shippy i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 17:51:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12215856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "Pucker up," Ann orders.Ryuji obeys, quietly. His eyes are closed, but he can feel her fingers pressing against his chin in an unspoken command. They feel odd against his skin, what with the foundation and blush and whatever it is she's been working with for the last twenty minutes.





	tell me that i'm pretty

"Pucker up," Ann orders.

Ryuji obeys, quietly. His eyes are closed, but he can feel her fingers pressing against his chin in an unspoken command. They feel odd against his skin, what with the foundation and blush and whatever it is she's been working with for the last twenty minutes. He tilts his face up, and Ann hums in satisfaction. She gets to work.

The lipstick feels sticky and a bit strange, but he doesn't complain. He doesn't know what color she chose this time— last week, it had been deep purple and matte. "It's not really your hue, to be honest," Ann had confessed, frowning slightly. "It kinda looks like a bruise to me."

Ryuji'd liked it, though. The purple had reminded him of a picture he'd seen of a sunset, once. (It wasn't mottled enough to be a bruise, anyways. He'd know.)

Ryuji's lips are kinda wide and thin, but Ann's gotten pretty good at redrawing them by now. "How's this?" She asks him, holding up a hand mirror. Sparkly and shiny and pink this week. Ryuji smiles, experimentally. His mouth is soft and pert and looks nothing like it usually does.

"I really like it," he says.

"Alright, then, that's good! I'll do your eyes next, so close your eyes again." Ann preferred to put on lipstick before eyeliner and eyeshadow and mascara. It wasn't for any particular reason, it just felt more natural to her that way, she'd told him. Her mom had taught her how to do lipstick first, when she was little, probably because she didn't trust seven year old Ann with stuff like eyeliner yet. Ann liked to talk to Ryuji while she worked. It was a constant background noise in the otherwise quiet room.

It wasn't as if Ryuji minded, though. Listening to Ann was nice. Sometimes, she'd talk about how Shiho was doing in physio and her voice would get all soft and tender, or she'd get excited while talking about a new sweet shop she'd visited in Shinjuku, or proud about a new high score in one of her weird rhythm phone games. And she'd always tell Ryuji exactly what she was doing, and why, even if he didn't understand it at all.

Yeah. Ann's voice was nice.

"Brow pencil, now." He feels it scritch against his eyebrows in short, firm strokes. He knows that Ann has a hard time getting them completely symmetrical because of how short they are naturally, but he thinks it's alright if they're a little bit crooked. The point of this isn't to look perfect, after all.

"Hmmmm. I think that'll do."

Ann pauses for a second to stretch. She doesn’t have any makeup on herself, and her hair is in a messy bun. She's wearing comfortable-looking sweatpants and an old graphic tee that's been washed so many times that it's impossible to tell what the picture was supposed to be in the first place. And yet, she still walks like she knows that she's beautiful and gorgeous, that she's the most amazing thing in the room and everyone should look at her, and it _works_. Ryuji envies her for that.

"Move your leg a bit? I need to get the eyeshadow, I left it on the counter." Ryuji tucks his legs underneath the stool he's sitting in. "Thanks."

Ann has a lot of beauty products. Makeup, lotions, brushes… "Everyone sends my parents free stuff, because they're hoping to get advertising from them someday." Ann told Ryuji once. "It can get sort of annoying, but at least it mostly means I never run out of anything."

They usually sit on the couch, but tonight, her intimidating arsenal of beauty products is scattered on her kitchen countertop. Ryuji is sitting on a stool in front of her, with his hands limp in his lap. The first time he'd come over, he'd been stiff as a board, and he'd had to sit on his hands to keep from fiddling with them nervously.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Ann had said. "You can relax."

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize. Everything's going to be okay, Ryuji. You can trust me."

Ryuji hadn't. Not really, not at first. It was one thing to trust someone to fight with you against monsters and monstrous humans, but this was something else entirely. It wasn't in Ryuji's nature to show this kind of complete emotional vulnerability. (He'd been hurt far too badly, by people he should have been able to trust, for that.)

He trusts Ann now, though. Ann's safe.

He listens to her absentmindedly hum the chorus to a Top 100 pop song as she snaps her eyeshadow palette open. "Pearl pink tonight." She decides. "I think it'll go with the lip gloss the best. And maybe some of the metallic gold, we'll see."

She looks at Ryuji. "What are your thoughts?"

It had taken a while for Ryuji to understand that she actually, really cared about what he thought. He can't just shrug and stay silent and let her do whatever she wants, because she's trying to do what _Ryuji_ wants and she can't do that if he says nothin'.

Ryuji tentatively volunteers, "I like the sparkles? In the lipstick, I mean. They were nice."

Ann grins at him. "Alright, I think I can do something with that." She picks up a small brush and frowns at it, before setting it back down and picking up an identical one, to Ryuji's eyes. Her movements are easy and practiced. When Ann finally reaches out for Ryuji's face with the brush, he closes his eyes before she can tell him to do so.

Ryuji still twitches a little whenever he feels something touch his eyes, but at least he's not flinching back anymore. The first time, Ann had been completely unable to do mascara or eyeliner or even eyeshadow without Ryuji jerking away and ruining everything. "Sorry," he'd said the third time Ann's eyeliner had left an angry dark brown slash through the corner of his eye. "Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe we should stop."

Ann had shaken her head, while she screwed the cap back on. "It's alright, we don't need to go the full nine yards today. I'm not going to do anything you're not comfortable with."

And she hadn't touched eye makeup again, until Ryuji had asked one night, "Can… can we try the eyeshadow again?"

She'd looked at him and asked "Are you sure?" and he'd been this close to chickening out again, but in the end he'd swallowed his fear and nodded. She'd kept it simple at first—just a slightly different shade of brown, that was barely noticeable. Ryuji had liked it anyways.

"Do you want to try mascara this time?" Ann asks.

"That's the stuff for eyelashes, right?"

"Yep."

"Okay. Yeah, sure."

Ann picks a fat black tube up off of the counter and unscrews it with a wet-sounding _pop_. "It's gonna feel a little weird." She warns. "But you have to keep your eyes open for this." And it does feel weird. Ryuji can't really say he enjoys the sensation of his eyelashes being tugged at, but he tries his best to keep from blinking anyways.

"You're doing great." Ann tells him. "Just one more thing and we'll be done with this part." She takes a little plastic tub and one of her big and soft blush brushes and swipes whatever's in there over Ryuji's cheeks a few times.

"Body glitter!" She cheerfully announces. "Technically, I should be using glue for this, but eh, glitter clings pretty well already, and I don't wanna deal with glue tonight."

"Okay." Ryuji says. He looks at Ann, and smiles at her uncertainly. "Thanks, Ann. Sorry for bein' a bother."

Ann flicks his nose with the brush. "What did I tell you about apologizing? I'm not doing this because I have to, I'm doing this because I'm your friend."

"I didn't think that we'd be doing this every week, though. Don't you have better things to do?"

Ann gets an odd look on her face, and sets down everything in her hands. She reaches over, very carefully, to hug Ryuji. "Hey, none of that, okay? Don't you remember what I told you that first day?"

Of course he does. They've only been doing this for a month or two.

It had started on an impulse. Ann had noticed Ryuji looking down one day, when Akira was busy and there was nothing else to do but hang out and avoid homework.

"Tell me what's wrong," she'd said.

"Nothing's wrong!" Ryuji had protested, too forcefully to be completely truthful.

It had taken a lot of patience to pry the details out of Ryuji, but if Ann was anything, it was stubborn. "You gotta promise not to laugh, okay?" He'd said.

Ann had nodded solemnly. "I promise."

Ryuji's next words were staccato quick and quiet, and he'd looked at the floor instead of meeting Ann's eyes.

"I don't like it when people call me a hooligan or a monkey or whatever," he'd said. "I hate the way I look. I hate it, but I dunno what to do about it 'cause it ain't as if I got the time or money to spend on my appearance and I don't wanna give Ma more shit to worry about. But I don't want to look in the mirror n' see me look like _me_ , sometimes."

"Sometimes," Ryuji had confessed, "I wish I could look nice like you always do, you know?"

And maybe it was the way that Ryuji had twisted up his hands in the hem of his shirt, or the way that he kept bunching up his shoulders defensively like he'd been ashamed, or maybe it was something else entirely that Ann didn't have the words for, but she had taken his hand in hers and said, "If you want to look pretty, then you just needed to ask."

And Ryuji had looked at her with a kind of awful, desperate but guarded hope, and that had sealed the deal.

And here they are, now.

They don't talk about it much, though. Not because they're ashamed of it, but because it just doesn't seem to be something that they should share. It's something that's only for Ann-and-Ryuji, and nobody else.

"I think this'll do for tonight." Ann says. "You can look now."

She holds up a mirror in front of Ryuji.

Ryuji knows his face is too long and flat to be cute, and his eyes aren't particularly appealing. His ears stick out. His ma tells him this all the time, not in an unkind way or anything. She loves him, and it's not mean if it's true. (That doesn't really stop it from stinging, though.)

But somehow, none of that matters in Ann's hands. Somewhere between the lipstick, and the eyeshadow, and the mascara, all of Ryuji's rough edges have been softened and polished. It's…

He's…

Ryuji doesn't have the words. It's just nice. He feels nice in a way that he doesn't, usually, and it's like there's a knot loosening in his chest that's been tangled up in there for so long that he'd forgotten about it until now. It's scary as hell to drag this part of himself out into the light, but he wants to. He _wants_ this so bad he think he might die if he doesn't, otherwise.

Ann's shoveling all of her makeup supplies back into a big box, and carries it back to her room. When she comes back, she flounces onto the comfortable old couch and pats the seat next to her, expectantly. Ryuji joins her, and Ann curls up and tucks herself into his side. "We're watching _Manhattan Love Story_ tonight." She informs him. "It's kinda old, but I remember liking it as a kid."

"What's it about?" Ryuji asks.

Ann flashes him a quicksilver smile. "Honestly? I can't remember!"

She laughs, infectiously. Ryuji can't help himself from smiling, as he leans into her too.

* * *

 

Twenty minutes or so into the drama, Ann speaks up again.

"You know… I have jewelry too, if you want to try that sometime. I think you'd look nice with a choker, or some dangly earrings."

Ryuji considers it for a second. "Maybe… can we do that next time? I think I'd like that."

"Okay. Whatever you want, Ryuji."


End file.
